a flowing onward

MILAN HABER'S DEEP DRAWING (written by Simon Ingram)

"One can explain my choice of words in Scrabble, for example, as the outcome of an extended cognitive process

involving the rearrangement of tiles on my tray"

Andy Clarke and Dave Chalmers

We see in a room with a trestle table running the length of the gallery's longest wall holding half-inch 'stacks' of white A4 and A3 paper. These have been drawn on and cut into, resin has been poured onto and into some of the paper's recesses and the subsequently sticky pools that have formed provide for a material complexity and tactility that has close associations with painting. Yet these stacks are not paintings so much as Milan Haber's version of 'extended drawing' approaching painting.

Complementing this array is another trestle table, shorter this time and with a recess made in the body of the table's top, full of still wet, blue fluid. This particular work has clear association with swimming pools and the depth here is cool and clear when compared with the darker, more complex and subterranean, even existential, depths the artist mines out of the stacks. This difference in affective temperature is toyed with differently in the adjoining room: what on first encounter looks like drastically over-cooked or charcoaled slices of pumpkin or squash, end up surprising their viewers by being modeled entirely out of black fimo clay.

With the stacks, Haber begins by drawing on the paper's top sheet. The mode of drawing is automatic, and within a graphic frame of reference, loose and questioning. At times line calls out to the possibilities of the constructivist grid, to a working drawing for a compressed and collapsed variant of Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, which Haber designs as a paper based ruin. At other times one might recall the sorts of gestures in the automatist drawing of Max Ernst and Joan Miro or the automatism carried over into the formalist space of painting familiar in Aschille Gorky and Jackson Pollock.

There are three kinds of drawing in the stacks: circle, grid, and scribble. At times, all three share a page in mutual coexistence. At other times, one charts the pages alone. What is evident is that at a moment of critical linear mass, pen is replaced for a blade and the line that had divided the virtual or implied space of 'the picture' is traded for a line that is an incision, a literal cut in the actual, deep space, of the object'. What sort of objects do these stacks become? There seem at least two productive ways of coming at this question. It is either Haber's 'inner world' that is revealed in this drawing-to-object operation, or else, it's a matter of the paper's 'secret life' building the stack.

In the first, Haber can be said to “extend his mind” into paper. It is a commonplace to regard mind as a separated, bracketed property, demarcated by “skin and skull” and separate from, or else not extended into, body or matter. Some however, tend to consider cognition to be actively shaped by external or environmental factors including material, language and tools. A good example is the way a scrabble player's thinking about their game can be said to include the discrete acts of shuffling and searching for linguistic combinations. One might say then that similarly to the Scrabble player with their board and letters, Haber “enrols” paper, pen and craft knife into an extended mechanism of mind-the stack becomes a real extension of a mind established in gaming-through-drawing.

In the second, Haber mines the paper stack's life. One might imagine the potential for any or all the world's writing to take place within these pages and Haber's intervention as a mining of the paper's future. Which somehow means the paper is part of a greater system of paper—here we would need to see paper as coextensive and bound by secret lines of communication with all other paper and also, make room in our interpretation for Haber to act as a miner of the stacks who drills down into their material substrate and allows their life to emerge. This amounts to thinking of the stacks as enacting an artificial sort of consciousness distributed through paper and the stacks as isolated sites of mining that act reciprocally as filling stations for artist and viewer alike.

In the end the distance to travel between these two options is not so great, and is matter of the difference between an artist 'enrolling' a material system into their thought process and an artist discovering one already there. (So, a question of how one wishes to construct authorship in Haber's project).

If the stacks can be said to run an automatist programme it is an abstract or formalist one that eschews narrative toa greater extent than the 'pool' and 'pumpkins'. These two works occupy the figurative associative end of Haber's project, but they share in the gaming that is core to the meaning production of the stacks. This is especially so of the pumpkins and can be discussed as a method that develops out of the freedom of unintended consequences—a mode of making where 'object a' suggests 'object b', which in turn implies the necessity of 'object c' in such a way that 'object a' is absented from the work's memory as a scaffold will eventually be removed from a building.

In sum the three components of Haber's Deep Drawing operate with a motive that is not immediately comprehensible in terms familiar to logic or narrative but which nonetheless ordered on visually legible ways and constructed out of specific sets of material relationships and techniques underscored with the pragmatics of construction, destruction and entropy.